Joost – the streaming video service that started as a P2P client, failed, and went back to the Web – has partnered with Netlog, the MySpace-like social Netlog prominent in continental Europe.

Netlog’s 40 million users can now access Joost’s video library directly from the social network’s home page. It’s a significant distribution deal for Joost, which only recently started getting traction when it switched to in-browser streaming.

It will also help keep Netlog’s users, 60 per cent of whom are between 14 to 24 years old, amused.

I’ll keep this short. If you’d like to pitch your startup at the Future of Web Apps day-long event in Dublin this week, then get in touch with me via email. Just send a paragraph about your startup (how it’s funded, team, competitors, revenue/business model and any links). Don’t make it too long-winded. Pitches on the day will be 120 seconds long. Your startup or web app DOES NOT have to be in beta/alpha, it can already be launched. After each pitch judges will give them feedback, live on stage. Get emailing. Deadline for entries is close of play Wednesday March 3.

Rob Williams, co-founder of one of the UK’s leading online companies Dolphin Music, died in a skiing accident yesterday evening while on holiday in the Swiss Alps. Mr Williams, 29, had been part of a group break for UK entrepreneurs in the ski resort of Verbier. He became separated from his group during very harsh weather conditions. His family and work colleagues have now been informed.

Although several members of the holiday group of entrepreneurs had left by Monday night, Williams and his co-founder and friend Jason Tavaria had stayed on to ski, but visibilty was reduced to near zero as a blizzard descended. The two men became over-due for return to their chalet and a search was launched. The two became separated in deep snow, but Jason was found by a mountain rescue team. Rob remained missing until his body was discovered later.

The hunt for Rob and Jason has been well documented online and involved his friends frantically attempting to use Twitter, GPS and iPhones to try and pinpoint their location. Although the technology used may well have been of some help to the search party, it is likely that Verbier’s Mountain Rescue team was far more instrumental in Jason’s rescue. Whatever the circumstance – and no doubt more details will come out in due course – tragically, Rob had become separated from his friend in harsh blizzard conditions that any technology probably became useless.

I just got off the phone to one member of the trip. They said: “Everyone literally said they’d just had the best time on the trip. And then it went straight to the opposite. We are all in shock.”

I never knew Rob, but on behalf of myself and TechCrunch, we’d like to pass on our deepest sympathies to his family. Below, I have put together a small tribute to Rob’s considerable achievements at Dolphin. We give thanks for Jason’s safe return. Our thoughts and prayers are with Rob’s family and with his friends in Verbier right now.

[This post will continue to be updated if there is any further information to impart].

Update: Other news outlets have now picked up the story
Sky News
Daily Mail
The Daily Telegraph
Press Association

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Rob launched Dolphin Enterprises – today one of the leading providers of musical equipment on the internet in the UK – with Jason while they were still at university in September 1999. Rob was originally responsible for creating Dolphin’s original php/MySQL web application and running its platform thereafter.

The pair had been friends since school in St Albans, selling everything from computer games to magazines to the other kids in the playground.

The two friends used their student loans to start the business. Like many typical startups they ran the business from home, but it has since grown to a staff of over 65 with turnover of £13m. In 2007 it was ranked Britain’s 11th fastest-growing company. They also opened retail stores in Liverpool, Gateshead and Huddersfield and had plans to expand into Europe and the Far East. Along with Jason, Rob was profiled in The Daily Telegraph in December last year. Dolphin Music was also presented with an award for Best Performing Business at the Kick Start Awards.

In December 2007 Dolphin Music was named in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list for the second year running. The Liverpool-based musical instrument retailer was listed as the 37th fastest growing company in the UK, and was the only retailer to appear in the list. Dolphin is also on Twitter.

Rob was a great supporter of schemes to help young people into the entrepreneurial life, supporting the government’s Make Your Mark initiative. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends and colleagues.

DeskspaceGenie launches today as a marketplace for people who want to rent desks and others to rent out. It sounds like a God-send for people with spare desks and who need the revenue in these tough times – and could be great for small startups who could well get deskspace for a fraction of the normal market prices. The site will be aimed at freelancers, journalists, entrepreneurs, designers, and anyone.

They are starting out with a two month beta trial where it’s free to advertise the deskspace, but look out for some kind of charging after that. The initial focus is on Bristol, Manchester, London, Brighton and Birmingham.

The venture is a new business from the “vertical search network” company genie ventures owned by Philip Wilkinson and Ciaron Dunne.

Future plans include Twitter / Facebook integration, the launch of sister site “meetingspacegenie”, and the rollout of more cities.

Who will be hit by this? Perhaps Gumtree, but not by much. Regis offices tend to be for larger companies who need dedicated space, but who knows, it may have some effect on their business.

London-based VC Index Ventures has closed its new early-stage 350 million Euro venture fund. The fund follows its 2007 fund of the same size which saw it back Netlog (a European MySpace), OpenX, Viagogo, MyHeritage, Playfish and a number of other high profile startups. It also raised a $400 million late stage fund last year, and is known for exits including Skype and MySQL.

Index remains focused on Europe, Israel and the U.S. and, says TechCrunch, is looking closely at mobile advertising, cloud computing and virtualization.

Index’ best-known partner Danny Rimer has been ranked number 16 on Forbes’ annual Midas List – as well as for being one of the shrewdest players around who’s happy to play hardball when required.

So where does that leave the top-tier pan-European VC scene?

Last December Accel announced two new funds that added more than $1 billion to their war chest: Accel Growth Fund at $480 million and Accel London III at $525 million. The Growth Fund focuses on later stage investments information technology, internet, digital media, mobile, networking, software, and services. The London fund invests in early and late stage European and Israeli startups. It’s current and past portfolio includes Baidu, Brightcove, Comscore, Etsy, Facebook, Walmart.com, Zimbra and dozens of other startups. Accel has offices in Palo Alto, London and Bangalore as well as in China via a IDG-Accel Partnership.

In January this year Balderton – now best known for exiting from Bebo with $140m – secured a new £285 million ($430 million) fund to invest in technology and media startups.

In January Atlas Venture closed its eighth fund (Fund VIII), which comes in at $283 million.

So who in the class has not signed Teacher’s register yet?

Wellington Partners is still running on the smell of its 4th early stage fund of 250m Euros which it announced in Q4 of 2007. This is exclusively geared to tech companies in Europe and have gone into Adconian, Proximic (out of Germany), Game Duell (Berlin) and Truphone in the UK.

We’re still waiting for hear from DFJ Esprit (rumoured to be in the late stages of closing a new fund), Advent Venture Partners and Doughty Hanson.

Gossips whisper that if one of these latter three doesn’t close a new round then this will be evidence of the predicted shakeout in the European VC market. And that’s generally perceived to be “a good thing” – depending on who you are of course.

Doodle is a free web app which helps you find suitable dates for group events, like an appointment, a conference call etc. It’s been around for a while as a hacker project, but after growing has now turned into a real startup.

The proposition has always been simple: create a poll for a suitable meeting time and let people fill in the blanks about when they are available. It’s a an idea which works very well, and is easily messed up. London-based ikordo closed through lack of funding, a complex interface and the inability to convert its largely corporate target market to the idea. By contrast Doodle has grown virally amongst geeks.

However, the London and Zurich-based Doodle, has just gone live with an Outlook plugin which allows Outlook users to automatically fill in Doodle polls and to book tentative and final slots in their calendar. In adddition, the generic MyDoodle ICS Calendar feed will connect Doodle to all other major calendars like Google Calendar, Sunbird, or Mac’s iCal and keep users updated on the state of their Doodle polls.

Doodle’s competitors include Tungle and Timebridge.

But guess what?

Tungle also comes as an Outlook plugin that automatically loads all of your contacts and calendar events (either from Outlook itself or other calendar apps like Google Calendar). You can choose to share your schedule with others who also have the plugin installed, and you can invite others to a meeting whether or not they use Outlook. Tungle raised $1.5m from JLA Ventures and Des Jardins Venture Capital in May 2007. TimeBridge, originally started out as a deeply integrated Outlook plug-in but re-launched with a full web only interface that integrates with your Google and Outlook calendars, and others. Jiffle is another competitor, also with Outlook sharing.

Both are larger and have more funding than Doodle, however, they currently claims a healthy and growing 2.5 million unique users with 80,000 users in the UK.

So perhaps Doodle will rely on other aspects to set it apart?

It’s unveiling a branded service to enable organisations to run their own private Doodle meeting scheduler. And a version to create a new poll via email rather than the Web using an email bot via init[@]doodle.com.

More significantly they are also opening up their RESTful Doodle API to enable developers to create new apps on their platform to improve scheduling of meetings, conference calls and social events. Developers could create email-based interfaces and Windows-based desktop widgets, or even integrate Doodle into mobile platforms, like Blackberry, and web portals. The Doodle API is RESTful and supports the OAuth, the promising protocol to allow secure authorization of web services. And they’re offering a week in Zurich to the developer with the best Doodle-based application.

Personally I like Doodle. I’ve been using it since it was created and it basically just works, so I’d recommend anyone giving it a try.

• From today you can download the the restaurant listings from the 2009 Michelin guide Europe for the iPhone. But given that it’s £5.99 I think I’ll stick to something like the Rummble app on my iPhone, or indeed Qype, for free. It’s also only in French.

• Berlin-based Plista has now gone public with its personalisation and recommendation network. It has an enhanced Firefox extension and the first stable version for Internet Explorer. They’ve also integrated Facebook Connect, allowing for the import of friends for following their activity across multiple domains. Plista now supports over 100 German and international Websites. It also has a native WordPress Plugin for blog visitors. Here’s our Plista review.

• UK-based Humyo.com has upgraded its online collaborative tool WorkSpace – its cloud storage solution aimed at small businesses – to include automatic synchronisation, making online collaboration and version control easier. Users will now be able to ensure the most recent version of a file is always available without relying on manual backup. The latest version of WorkSpace also includes a news feed of recent activities.

• The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally has 250 submissions at the moment and is looking for more from UK startups.

• US-based mobile media company Handmark has launched in the UK with a version of its Pocket Express java-based mobile news and information service, featuring a full on-device application store. The service will support local content in eight languages across Europe – English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Swedish. Pocket Express is a free alternative to something it describes as “the painful traditional mobile browsing experience” to access “news, information, and entertainment services into one, easy-to-use application”. The trouble is, mobile browsing has actually never been better on device like the iPhone and Android mobiles. I wonder when they’ll drop this out-dated model? They also have a “MobileCierge” team of 24/7 mobile personal assistants. Crazy… Then again, perhaps they’ll get traction among low-end java handsets?

• UK content management and software company Modera, says it “will invest £1.3 million” in research and development over the next two years into its ModeraNET2, a second generation web application development platform for its CMS and CRM products. Clients include Citizen Watches, Group 4 Securicor (GS4), Hong Kong Express Airline, Jamiroquai.com, Nissan and The Mama Group Plc. Since there is absolutely no way of verifying if this is true or not, let’s put this down to PR-guff and move on shall we? And Jamiroquai? Surely they should just do it on WordPress?

• In fact perhaps they should save some time and money and just go hire – or buy out – Michael Kowalski and his kitsite.com, which runs the London 2012 site. They found that the problem with most CMSs are that they are really configuration-heavy. So they are developing jitapp.comwhere you leave off doing any config for as long as you can, but where you still get some control over what updates can be made to your site. The model is pay-per-update where an “update” is defined as updating a single page as many times as you like in a 24 hour period. Or a fixed price plan if you’re a really heavy user. Check out the video demo:

Jit demo from Aanand Prasad on Vimeo.

This week’s first TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a .NET Web Developer for Smarta, an interesting new startup promoting, other startups.

Remember, it costs only £20 to post *any* kind of advert on the CrunchBoard related to your startup/business, whether it be jobs, searches for office space or requests for new projects.

Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (8,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 7,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on CrunchBoard and contact editorial.

There are plenty of people trying to make the musical instruments applications on the iPhone sound like real music, but one of the more credible is that by unsigned all-female band called The Mentalists here in London.

They’ve done an unusual cover of MGMT’s “Kids” entirely using their iPhones and iPod Touches, using apps from the application store. The result is actually quite impressive.

The apps used were Ocarina, Retro Synth, miniSynth and DigiDrummer Lite (yes, not event the paid-for version). However, as usual, drummers who can keep time remain in short supply. The same was true of The Beatles, and still is today…

Whoever is running the digital marketing for the Skittles sweet brand needs to be given a medal. They are clearly pushing the envelope on what a brand can do online and are not afraid of the Wildean maxim “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

In April 2006, well before Twitter launched, the Masterfoods brand sponsored a little-known mobile social sofware site, BuddyPing, to offer users a free account under the ‘Skittles Big Summer’ promotion. The brand then picked up the costs on behalf of users who signed up to the promotion. What happened to that trial I don’t know, but it’s interesting to note that it even happened, because it was never widely promoted. They were clearly testing the water.

Today, they did something else pretty cool. They changed the Skittles home page to show a Skittles logo over-layed above a Twitter search for the word “Skittles”. Before you can see the full page you have to register your age, because they obviously cannot control what people say on Twitter.

I tested this out by Tweeting “Skittles give you cancer and is the cause of all world evil http://skittles.com/” and it duly appeared. That takes guts.

UPDATE: Of course, it may well backfire. Twitterers are starting to game the idea now, e.g.:

UPDATE II: Looks like they’ve been doing this with Wikipedia too.